Posts by Alan Smith

I have known Russ for 2 years, worked alongside him every day for 13 months. He's a pussycat, but with a serious allergy to things he considers bullshit. Which makes two of us. You would be surprised at how many LENR people I meet who say 'give my best wishes to Russ' and really mean it. He has enemies for sure (another thing we share) but he has many friends too, and never hesitates to heap praise on many people in the field whose work, brains and skills he admires.

In any case, the upcoming 30th anniversary deals with F&P, not Rossi and his farces. The only challenge that makes sense in this weeks is to reach a deeper understanding of their experimental results and possibly a broader agreement on the reality of their claims.

There is broad agreement that their results are sound. You are one of a select band of F&P deniers, and on the wrong side of a very poor argument.

As I said, if you know it is going to happen, you can measure something like a ~2700 J explosion with a bomb calorimeter. The problem with cold fusion is, this will probably not exceed the limits of chemistry. It will not be as convincing as a slow reaction that goes for hours or days, producing much more than 4 eV per atom (the limits for most chemical reactions).

Long ago i got roped into doing oxygen bomb calorimetry on solid fuels for the UK's NCB (National Coal Board.) I suspect ! got the job because nobody else was prepared to dirty their lab-coat, because it could be very messy at times. It was not unknown for the NCB to send a batch of egg-shaped objects that sometimes hardly burnt at all, even in oxygen. Later I discovered that this stuff was the outcome of a vastly expensive project to re-work the spoil-tips on legacy coal mines into saleable fuel. This was bad timing as city after city across the UK was 'going smokeless', and not before time.

1. It is usually difficult to measure the energy from an uncontrolled heat burst.

2. If it is uncontrolled, it is probably also unpredictable. It is probably difficult to trigger. You never know when it will appear. Something like an explosion or melt-down that always happens would be better than a rare, unpredictable out-of-control event, but I have never heard of such a thing. If you knew it was going to happen, you could put the device into a bomb calorimeter. Still, the reaction would probably destroy the device, which is problematic. You would have to make a new gadget from scratch for every test.

1. It is indeed, and while very impressive it may not actually contain a vast amount of energy since it can be of quite short duration. So interesting phenomenon but can be as annoying as it is helpful.

2. It is not totally unpredictable insofar as triggering goes. However, magnitude and duration of triggered events are very unpredictable, though even the biggest events have yet to cause more than excitement and localised thermal damage, No good bangs yet. That may happen though I doubt it - we shall see.

No - it's Mitch's exceptional willingness to bang heads with the USPTO that is the problem. He insists on calling a spade a spade, whereas if he described it as a novel kind of shovel he might get on a bit better.

Report to the Norwegian-Norwegian-Norwegian-Norwegian-Norwegian Defence Research Laboratory for research, written by an electro-chemist. Useful round-up of current research and researchers at the end..